1. IBM
The compelling returns from
IBM Connections in support
of social business
Five stories

2. 2 The compelling returns from IBM Connections in support of social businesss
Creating deeper relationships and returns
Business success depends on people—people making connections,
people sharing ideas and people building trust. An employee
thinks of a new way to streamline a process and tells his or her
supervisor. A product developer gathers feedback from customers
and passes it on to the design team. A consumer identifies with
a brand and purchases the product. One by one, business rela-
tionships are established and nurtured, laying the foundation
for continued growth and profitability.
Increasingly, organizations that are outperforming others have
seized on the opportunity to adopt the next generation of enter-
prise communication and collaboration tools to help people
build and maintain these relationships. They recognize that—
in today’s global, mobile business environment—now is the time
to begin the transformation to social business. The business
advantages to be gained include a more effective workforce,
accelerated innovation and deeper customer relationships.
Acknowledging shifting expectations and
needs
The rapid infusion of emerging social collaboration technologies
into enterprise communications represents both the cause and
the effect of fundamental shifts in how business is conducted.
Employees, customers, partners and stakeholders expect work-
place interactions and marketplace transactions to be meaning-
ful, positive and engaging social experiences. What’s more,
they want them to be immediate. Telephone, email and other
established tools of communication are overburdened and need
to be extended to work side by side with the newer forms of
collaborative experiences.
In addition, as workforces become more globally distributed
and remote—and as barriers between work and personal time
continue to dissolve—people do indeed need more-effective
ways to exchange information and share ideas. They must be
able to hold meetings, share insights, make deals and purchase
goods at any time, from wherever they are, through the devices
and interfaces of their choice.
Marketing, customer service
Product and service development
Operations, human resources
R&D new ideas (internal)
market testing
Email and phone
knowledge silos
Deepen client
relationships
Drive operational
effectiveness
Workforce
optimization
Shares insights to generate break-
through ideas and speeds time to
market
Reaches out to professional
networks
“Push” marketing control
Trusted relationships
brand advocacyTraditional business
A social business
Entry points
Figure 1: The point at which each business begins its transformation to social business varies, but every social business drives value by making traditional
communication and collaboration networks more efficient, authentic and flexible.

3. IBM 3
The benefits of becoming a social
business today
A social business transforms itself by activating networks of
people. Whether through online communities and meetings,
team spaces, blogs, wikis, profiles or other social tools, people
can explore new ways to build and leverage their networks
beyond those dictated by traditional organizational structures
or means of communication. Information also becomes more
transparent and accessible, opening up new wells of knowledge
and expertise. As a result, people can be more efficient in their
tasks and more responsive, authentic and familiar in their
interactions. In turn, the organization as a whole becomes
increasingly nimble, engaged and creative.
The key to implementing social software is to set clear, realistic
objectives for your social business initiatives and to embed
social tools into existing role-based processes. The end point
for your organization includes the following:
• Enable an effective workforce: Operations, human resources
and other departments can increase overall employee
productivity and job satisfaction through improved knowledge
capture, expertise location, and collaboration. Travel, training
and teleconferencing expenses also can be reduced.
• Accelerate innovation: Product research and development
teams can quicken internal idea sharing and discovery, as well
as transform how they generate ideas, share strategies and
gather feedback from key customers and partners.
• Deepen customer relationships: With more immediate access
to content and expertise, customer service representatives can
work more efficiently and provide higher-quality service.
Marketing and sales teams can have more time to spend with
customers and to dedicate to customer-focused initiatives.
Many organizations, including IBM, that have already begun
making the transformation to a social business are reaping
the benefits and measuring the returns. As the five stories in
this paper clearly demonstrate, strategically integrating new
social software and tools into your processes—and shifting
your culture to support these changes—can deliver rapid,
impressive outcomes.
Project 1: A social payback in sales and
customer service
The organization
A leading health insurance network with millions of members
and more than 3,000 employees
The challenge
Today’s healthcare providers are under pressure as never
before to improve customer service, boost employee produc-
tivity and increase membership rates. Achieving such results,
however, is contingent on effective processes and information
technology for communications, collaboration and knowledge
management—areas that this insurer identified as needing
dramatic improvement.

4. 4 The compelling returns from IBM Connections in support of social businesss
Sales staff mired in tedious searches for information and exper-
tise had less time to spend with prospects, reducing their close
rates. Similarly, employees isolated in their departments and
workplaces found it hard to connect with experts. Duplicate
efforts wasted time and money. As one staffer said, “We don’t
know that similar projects are going on until it’s too late.” And
like in many organizations, employees were pressured to do more
with the same resources, a reality captured in the comment,
“We can’t hire but our goals are higher.” These challenges were
exacerbated as the organization became over-reliant on email
to manage these complex interactions and processes for com-
munication and collaboration. According to one employee,
“Conversation by email is dizzying!”
The project
To address such issues that directly impact productivity, cus-
tomer service and membership sales, the insurer began a proj-
ect to transform its intranet via social software from IBM. The
project started with a strategy that included detailed planning
and an analysis of the financial consequences.
The project team assessed the impact of an intranet portal hub
integrated with IBM social software and collaboration capabili-
ties providing communities, team rooms and real-time com-
munication. With IBM Connections at the heart of the online
experience, information can be easier to access from searchable
online communities of interest, meeting places, FAQs and file
shares. Employee profiles and profile searches can connect
employees with experts across the organization, as can blogs,
self-service forums and searchable histories of problems solved.
Collaboration and messaging can link on-premises and remote
employees in real time, raising their productivity in teams and
as individuals.
Customer service staff can particularly benefit, thanks to faster
and more transparent access to information and expertise in
support of customer claims and health issues. This improvement
is expected to boost word-of-mouth referrals and retention rates.
Sales staff, too, can be more productive through easier access to
information and experts and more dynamic and embedded col-
laboration tools. As a result, they are expected to close more sales.

5. IBM 5
The results
The enhanced web experience available to staff in sales, cus-
tomer service and other departments is estimated to deliver
financial benefits of US$12 million over three years.
• Cost savings of US$3.9 million include lower costs in training,
telephone usage, hosted third-party web conferencing, travel
to meetings, and hard-copy printing and distribution.
• Additional savings of US$8.1 million come from membership
gains due to higher sales closing rates, and productivity gains
from faster information searches and more effective
collaboration.
Project 1 estimated returns: financial benefits of US$12 million
over three years
Project 2: Accelerating global R&D in
consumer products
The organization
A large global consumer products company with more than
10,000 employees in global research and development (R&D)
The challenge
The challenges were threefold: shortening the development
cycle, optimizing the workforce and fostering innovation. Bar-
riers included difficulties in collaboration among far-flung staff
and work sites. As one employee noted, “After one of our
once-a-month teleconference meetings, I spend four to five
hours answering questions through email; often it is the same
question over and over.” Another said, “When there is no com-
munity, the default communication tool is the telephone.” In
addition, campuses and experts are often isolated, slowing proj-
ects and preventing the reuse of best practices and equipment.
“We need to shorten the development cycle,” said one staffer.
“Real value is derived from one campus discovering another
campus’s work.”

6. 6 The compelling returns from IBM Connections in support of social businesss
The project
Company stakeholders, with help from IBM, assessed how
IBM Connections could assist global R&D in increasing new
product innovation, enhancing development and speeding
time-to-market. The business value assessment examined col-
laborative use cases and projected the financial impact across
all global R&D campuses and operations.
IBM Connections empowers R&D staff to establish communities
of practice, initiate dialogues, find expertise and build trust with
colleagues at other sites. Listings of activities gather all the
messages, documents and postings needed to further specific
objectives. When a problem arises, a search of profiles can locate
the right expert. This saves time and fosters reuse of knowledge
and best practices. It also drives employee engagement and
satisfaction by creating a personal network of trusted colleagues.
As an example, Robert, a new research lead in Australia, finds
information on materials emulsification through a keyword
search discovering documents that were uploaded by an engi-
neer in Texas. Robert also finds an “emulsification community”
where he can ask questions and get tips via discussion forums.
As his work progresses, he uploads his own work to share with
the community. Multiplying such efficiencies across thousands
of researchers suggests the positive impact of social collabora-
tion via IBM Connections.
Such use cases provide substantial benefits to global R&D efforts.
Product innovations increase as people discover and share
expertise more easily. The organization becomes more efficient
as people capitalize on relationships to access information,
accomplish tasks and reduce duplicate work. Employees become
more engaged and satisfied as they grow through better net-
working and alignment of their talent with business priorities.
The results
In total, the assessment predicts US$14.1 million from cost
reductions and increased revenue for global R&D.
• Cost savings of US$7.8 million can result from more efficient
and less duplicative use of equipment and materials.
• Revenue can grow an estimated US$6.3 million from an R&D
organization that is more innovative and effective.
Project 2 estimated returns: US$14.1 million from cost reductions
and increased revenue

7. IBM 7
Project 3: Cultivating human resources
through social networking
The organization
An electric utility with over 10,000 employees, serving more
than 10 million people
The challenge
The utility’s business vision is to enable a cleaner and smarter
energy future by becoming more agile and better at managing
operational change. Essential to these objectives is the ability
to develop and maintain a stable, productive, flexible and satis-
fied workforce.
At present, workforce productivity suffers because there are
few avenues for top performers to share best practices with the
rest of the organization. High employee turnover and many
planned retirements leave gaps in resources and skills, making
it difficult to fill thousands of open positions in the coming
years. Seasoned staffers, already busy, are drained from having
to train and mentor new hires. There is simply no easy way to
reach out to fellow employees or to mine the talent pool for
internal job rotations or project teams.
Employee productivity and morale also suffer from reliance on
overburdened collaboration tools and processes. Employees must
rely too much on email for sharing documents, making it hard
to discover important information for decision making. Time
and manager bandwidth are wasted by a culture of excessive
face-to-face meetings to drive consensus and decisions, and a
dispersed workforce that must travel to in-person meetings
wastes time and energy, raises expenses and increases safety
risk. These and other operational inefficiencies cause poor
employee retention, with the highest turnover among those
with less than three years on the job.
The project
The centerpiece of the proposed deployment, designed in conjunc-
tion with an IBM Business Partner, includes IBM Connections,
along with complementary IBM technology for real-time commu-
nications, collaboration and content management.
Enhanced capabilities include improved knowledge capture, more
transparent expertise location and productive collaboration in
context. Real-time messaging and improved collaboration would
reduce the need for face-to-face meetings and status calls. Team
rooms and content libraries would improve sharing of content for
projects, teams and individuals. Profiles would help employees
Figure 2: Social tools facilitate smarter collaboration. By helping enable idea and knowledge sharing across organizational boundaries, social business initiatives
can boost innovation, productivity and job satisfaction.

8. 8 The compelling returns from IBM Connections in support of social businesss
find people and make themselves known. Communities of interest
would allow employees to share, innovate and collaborate. And
interactive information repositories such as wikis and activity tem-
plates would complement and possibly replace formal training.
The results
The financial analysis shows the power of IBM social software
to empower human resources, delivering both direct and indi-
rect financial benefits.
• The expense of travel to face-to-face meetings could be
reduced by an estimated US$8 million through online
expertise location; project-based commenting, messaging and
status updates; and knowledge management through wikis,
blogs, discussion forums and shared bookmarks.
• Employee training costs could be reduced by US$1.6 million,
faster ramp-up of new hires, and more engaged and satisfied
employees reducing the turnover rate.
• Teleconferencing expenses could be reduced by US$700,000.
• Reduced need for email storage could lower costs by an
estimated US$88,000.
Such direct benefits total potentially US$10.4 million, and
indirect benefits are estimated to be an additional US$18.5
million over five years. Top indirect contributors are higher
staff productivity, faster employee ramp-up times and
improved employee retention.
Total financial benefits from IBM social software are estimated
to be US$28.9 million, with nearly US$1 million occurring
during the first year.
Project 3 estimated returns: total financial benefits from IBM
social software are estimated to be US$28.9 million
Project 4: Sharing ideas across a
global workforce
The organization
One of the world’s largest suppliers of building materials, with
over 12,000 employees worldwide
The challenge
In years past, the company’s business model involved centralized
control over distributed, market-specific operational units.
Employees felt isolated in silos, and business units serving sim-
ilar markets were unnecessarily replicated around the world.
The company needed a way to remove barriers among people
to cost-effectively drive innovation and bring new products to
market that would better meet and exceed customer expectations.
The project
In late 2009, the company began deploying an internal col-
laboration platform using social technology. Social collabora-
tion would enable best practices around business processes and
functions to be accessed by all employees and groups regard-
less of their location. The ultimate goal was to create an agile,
efficient culture of open collaboration that would lower cycle
times, drive innovation and speed product time to market.

9. IBM 9
The collaboration platform would need to support key social
technologies and integrate them into a single online experience,
while ensuring ease of use. It would also have to be flexible
enough to support new collaborative practices as the need
arose. To meet these requirements, the company chose IBM
Connections. The company’s award-winning solution integrates
social software with messaging and unified communications on
a single home page, and is open to new capabilities as they are
developed. Its power to help transform the workforce is based
on social networking functions that can bring global visibility to
every employee and his or her contributions.
Communities of interest can be quickly formed to tackle chal-
lenges common across locations, marketplaces and skill sets.
Employee profiles empower networking practices such as col-
league introductions, connections and recommendations. Wikis
and blogs facilitate the sharing of knowledge and expertise, as
well as feedback and comments. Forums encourage discussion
of pressing business issues. Status posts in profiles and listings of
activities help employees previously stuck in silos to learn what
like-minded colleagues are working on and share successes and
challenges. Support for tags, community bookmarks and shar-
ing of files make it easy to locate knowledge and best practices.
The results
Usage statistics confirm the company’s success in fostering a
culture of open collaboration.
• Some 400 communities have been formed.
• Nearly 10,000 employees are working on regional initiatives.
• Over 1,600 employees are collaborating in global
communities to drive innovation, including process
improvement, environmental practices, product development
and marketing.
• Product engineers, previously trapped in their geography
silos, are able to share best practices across regions and
markets—the engineer in Brazil, for instance, sharing and
collaborating with a counterpart in Germany—helping them
adapt local products to global markets, enter new markets and
grow top-line revenues.
In fact, one of the communities was responsible for a new
global brand in a key product line being delivered in less than 4
months, three times faster than the usual 12. Such efficiencies
are currently saving the company more than US$1 million per
year, providing an immediate return during the first year.
“I do believe this is the future,” said the executive responsible
for innovation. “By making it easier to connect, we can make a
big company look like a small company. The result is an agile,
efficient and globally integrated enterprise.”
Project 4 estimated returns: US$1 million in savings per year

10. 10 The compelling returns from IBM Connections in support of social businesss
Project 5: A “sticky” social network
boosts revenues
The organization
A training institute for continuing education, with over 100,000
members, whose mission is to help members of the legal pro-
fession grow their professional competence and careers
The challenge
As a provider of cutting-edge legal education, the institute
wanted to further its leadership position—and its mission—by
extending education and professional growth beyond formal
seminars. The new business model would require development
of an online web exchange using social technology that would,
as the project leader described it, provide a place in which law
practitioners could come “to get the latest news, legal analyses
and information, as well as have immediate access to leading
experts in the field.” If the concept succeeded, seminar attend-
ees would return again. This “stickiness” would further their
professional competencies and careers, while improving the
institute’s prospects for business development through acceler-
ated membership and seminar participation.
To achieve these goals, in late 2007 the institute set out the
requirements for the web experience. The exchange would need
a workspace for posting all seminar-related information and
links to myriad content sources on related topics. Community
members would need to share their profiles and connect with
each other through email and instant messaging. A feedback
mechanism was also needed so the organization would better
understand clients’ learning requirements. And users had to
have ways to build knowledge bases collaboratively.
The project
Solution requirements aligned nicely with IBM social software.
Together with an IBM Business Partner, the institute created
an online experience that provides a comprehensive environ-
ment for Web 2.0 social networking, information exchange,
document management and collaboration. At the heart is IBM
Connections, which contributes support for user profiles,
blogs, wikis, shared bookmarks and other social activities.
These are complemented by email, instant messaging, docu-
ment management and web conferencing capabilities sup-
ported by the broader IBM social collaboration portfolio.
Network users, by invitation only, are gently encouraged to
complete their personal profiles. They then choose how to par-
ticipate, what to display in their profiles and how they want to
be contacted. Each user is then routed to a “microsite,” a com-
munity defined by the subject areas and attendees of a related
seminar. Each seminar-based community is equipped with a
wealth of social tools, as well as Really Simple Syndication
(RSS) newsfeeds, legal documents and a network of legal blog-
gers. Seminar attendees can view and interact with fellow stu-
dents, download course materials, query the faculty and
conduct further research. Faculty can review the profiles of
course registrants, perhaps adapting course material as a result.
After the seminar, the seminar-based communities live on.
Handouts and course materials are available, and students are
polled for feedback that will shape future programs. Members
can continue to generate and share knowledge through wikis
and blogs. They also can cultivate newly developed relation-
ships for a variety of career-enhancing purposes.

11. IBM 11
The results
A social network for the legal community has helped the insti-
tute achieve its primary mission of furthering members’ educa-
tion and professional growth. Currently, thousands of
attorneys participate, including in-house council from most of
the Fortune 1000 companies, as well as partners and associates
from leading law firms.
Community members do the following:
• Stay engaged, returning again and again
• Locate expertise and get answers to questions
• Identify new career opportunities and market their skills
After utilizing social networking tools from IBM, the institute
has experienced a positive growth in the client base of up to
1.25 percent per day. This rate of increase represents more
members for seminars, more expertise to share in online com-
munities, and more networking potential for the growing
membership.
As one community member said, “The use of Web 2.0 tech-
nology makes it easy for associates to avail themselves of a
user-friendly and sophisticated platform that permits them to
learn from each other, network with their colleagues and estab-
lish and maintain business relationships.”
Project 5 results: growth in the client base of up to 1.25 percent
per day
Taking the social business initiative
The business value that the organizations highlighted in this
paper expect to attain is distinct and measurable. Yet none of
these companies are becoming a social business overnight. The
transformation to social business is a journey.
Still, there’s advantage to be gained by getting started as soon
as possible. Your organization has the opportunity to jump in
front of its competitors by deploying social software now—
whether you’re interesting in building stronger relationships
with customers or achieving new levels of innovation and effi-
ciency. The biggest risk is to wait.
Why IBM?
The IBM social collaboration platform provides an exceptional
set of solutions and services for becoming a social business. IBM
Connections software is the centerpiece of our leading social
collaboration offerings, which also include IBM Lotus®
Quickr®
and IBM Lotus Sametime®
software. Our social tools span the
spectrum of workplace and marketplace interactions and can
be integrated into key business processes or deployed as stand-
alone applications. If needed, your organization can also tap
into our broad industry, governance and consulting expertise
to help ensure you get the most value from your investment.
For more information
To learn more about how you can use IBM Connections solu-
tions to make the transformation to a social business, contact
your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit:
ibm.com/social

12. © Copyright IBM Corporation 2011
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